Surfing isn’t always the end-all be-all in terms of happiness making
Sunny Garcia scares me. Always has. For one reason or another, when I was a young surfer in the early 1990s, I picked Sunny out of the constellation of hard-ass Hawaiians I could have feared to be the surfing boogeyman. Of course, I had nothing to fear from Sunny, or Johnny Boy Gomes, or Marvin Foster, or any of their contemporaries from where I lived, thousands of miles away on the Central Coast of California, with plenty of deranged beardos yelling at unfamiliar faces over wonky reefbreaks I should have been afraid of instead. But, nope, it was Sunny who haunted me. I’d flip through the pages of surf mags and see Sunny glaring out at me through an ad. Press play on a video and watch him cleave a poor North Shore wave in half with an honest-to-god man turn. Walk into a surf shop and see a poster of him standing tall and buff in a horrifying inside Sunset barrel and I’d be intimidated … More